Canada Ex-Bishop in Child Porn Case to Be Freed

By Michel Comte
AFP
January 4, 2012

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iKhHM_YoqAJunYY5UBh2Ny9je-pw?docId=CNG.492b824e3d30892c55885c510df35945.141

Raymond Lahey, a former Roman Catholic bishop, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for importing child pornography (AFP/File, Timothy A. Clary)

OTTAWA — A former Catholic bishop in Canada was sentenced Wednesday to 15 months in prison for importing child pornography -- including some laced with religious imagery -- but will be freed after already serving time in jail.

Raymond Lahey, 71, resigned as head of the Nova Scotia diocese of Antigonish in 2009 after a search at the Ottawa airport of his laptop computer uncovered a cache of child pornography.

He pleaded guilty in May 2011 to charges of possessing for the purpose of importing child pornography. The more than 600 photographs and videos found by police included scenes of bondage and boys in sex acts wearing a crucifix and rosary beads.

Having earned double credit for eight months spent in prison awaiting sentencing, Lahey will not spend any more time in jail, but still faces strict conditions including having no contact with youths.

Roger Touchette, who alleged that Lahey abused him in a car outside Ottawa's Notre Dame Cathedral when Touchette was 11 years old, said outside the courtroom that Lahey "is a devil."

"There's no sentence for him that would have been enough," he said, speaking on behalf of abuse victims and holding back tears in the frigid cold. "I got a life sentence... I'm going to die with this" pain.

Lahey's lawyer, Michael Edelson, told reporters Lahey has asked the church to strip him of his duties and "to be reduced to layman's status." But the Vatican has yet to respond.

"He's taken responsibility and I think that he's now living with what he's done and he realizes what his life is going to be like as a result of what he's done and he's resigned to his fate," Edelson said.

A child pornography conviction "essentially marks a person for life," he explained. "As a result you become a social pariah."

Lahey also faces accusations in a civil suit of sexually abusing an orphanage resident in the early 1980s, but has denied the allegations.

In a statement of claim filed in the Newfoundland supreme court in 2010, Todd Boland alleged Lahey, while still a priest, had abused him several times over four years at the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John's, Newfoundland.

"At the time, Monsignor Lahey would take him for an outing, as members of the clergy sometimes did, and that's when the abuse allegedly occurred," Greg Stack, Boland's lawyer, had told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The orphanage was closed in 1990 after it was revealed that staff had systematically abused some 300 residents over several decades.

In an odd twist, Lahey had brokered a landmark CAN$13 million dollar settlement with people who claimed to have been sexually abused by priests in his diocese of Antigonish dating back to 1950.

One month before his arrest on child pornography charges, he had offered the victims and their families apologies on behalf of the church and said he "hoped to never again have to deal with such reprehensible behavior."